Elizabeth Strother

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The Bush administration has rewritten the rules on rewriting the rules that govern national forest plans, and Jim Loesel smells a skunk.

"It is all guidelines -- you should do this or you shouldn't do that. The plan is no longer a document that makes decisions."

Loesel is a Roanoke landscape architect and longtime citizen activist on national forest management. He's fearful that 2005 rules governing the structure of forest plans will take away decision-making at the local forest level.

He's talking, he says, about a social compact between public servants and the people about how their forests will be managed over the 15-year life of such plans.

He has a reason for his sudden, if seemingly belated, interest. The National Forest Service is starting a revision of the George Washington National Forest Plan, and is holding a first round of public workshops this week up around the Alleghany Highlands.

Loesel predicts the impact of these meetings will be marginal.

JoBeth Brown, a Forest Service public affairs officer, takes quite a different view.

Public involvement will increase, she says, largely because the process of revising a forest plan has been streamlined. From start, this past February, to finish, in September 2008, the job will take less than two years. The old process could take a decade or longer. "It took us 13 years on the Jefferson," she points out.

"We think public involvement will be hugely increased, at a much more meaningful level -- people who use the forest and don't have time to work 10 years with us."

She's talking about people who like to bike or camp in the national forests, but are not advocates who, like forest officials, are paid to dedicate themselves to forest planning. The Forest Service wants to hear from people who work all day and have to come out after work to talk about what they want, Brown says. "Those comments are so important."

"Not till we implement a plan do we hear from them. We want to make it more user-friendly for real people using the woods."

Loesel is a real person, though, who uses the woods. He used to live in the Lexington area, where the Jefferson and George Washington National Forests meet. "I was really big into hunting and fishing. We used to go out on the national forest all the time. I really got to know the national forest."

As a result, he has come to be a fixture in years-long forest planning projects, usually without pay. He was hired at one time, he says, by the Southern Appalachian Forest Coalition. But he works for love, not money, as secretary of the Citizens Task Force on National Forest Management.

That's a big name for a small group of people who joined together in the early 1980s, Loesel says, "to provide comments on plan preparations." Membership varies; it might include experts in wildlife management, watershed management, groundwater, forestry, recreation. The task force now stands at six.

As for himself, Loesel says, "I'm one of these people that reads the regulations."

The change in the rules for revising forest plans disturbs him and excites Brown -- for much the same reason.

"The new regulations say the plan is supposed to be 'strategic documents' that set forth the 'aspirational'" vision of what people want the forest to be, Loesel says, his eyes rolling upward. "The public is going to spend time dreaming what the most perfect forest would look like. We're not dealing with reality, but with dreams."

The Forest Service "went to the same kind of strategic planning counties use," Brown tells me in a later phone interview. "A comprehensive plan that is a strategic vision of what we'd like the forest to look like."

Loesel is used to working as an interested citizen on specific, concrete forest issues, such as roadless area designations. "The role of the public early on in planning was to define the issues the plan had to address," he says approvingly.

"In the past," Brown says, "we did a very integrated, thick document at the forest planning level, and then when we proposed a project, we did it again." Environmental impact statements were done at both levels, for example. Now, they will be done only at a site-specific level.

"The new rules require us to be very collaborative," she says. "All the people with different interests will talk to each other, not just to us individually."

Loesel has his eye, though, on the Draft Comprehensive Evaluation Report, "the document that makes the argument for why or why not change" something in the forest plan. "The CER is what people ought to be prepared to comment on," he says. Given the expedited planning process, he's worried the public won't have much chance to influence it.

He acknowledges the new process will be more efficient. But, he says, "it is essentially downplaying the importance of the plan in setting priorities." He believes those will be set in Washington, not in Western Virginia.

Strother is a member of The Roanoke Times editorial board.

The Draft Comprehensive Evaluation Report is online at www.fs.fed.us/r8/gwj/forestplan/revision/plan-home.shtml